Fall 2011 Schedule

MSU/MAM: Art Talks

CO-SPONSORED BY MONTCLAIR STATE UNIVERSITY, DEPARTMENT OF ART & DESIGN, MASTER OF FINE ARTS PROGRAM AND THE MONTCLAIR ART MUSEUM.

OCTOBER 13 Montclair Art Museum 7:00 PM VITO ACCONCI Vito Acconci’s design & architecture comes from another direction, from backgrounds of writing & art. His poems in the late 60’s treated words as matter & the page as a field to move over; his performances in the early 70’s shifted art from object to interaction; his installations in the later 70’s turned museums & galleries into community-meetings. By the late 80’s his work crossed over & he formed Acconci Studio, a design firm that mixes poetry & geometry, computer-scripting & sentence-structure, narrative & biology, chemistry & social-science. They treat architecture not as nodes but as circulation-routes & about time as much as about space; they make spaces fluid, changeable & portable; they design buildings that slip into landscape & vice versa, but they start with clothing & end with vehicles; they make architecture subservient to people & not vice versa -- they anticipate cities on the move. Built in the last decade are, in Graz, a person-made island; in Tokyo, a clothing store as soft as clothing; in Coney Island an elevated subway-station façade that waves & bulges to make views & seats. About to be built, in Indianapolis, is an interactive tunnel through a building; in Toronto, a building-complex fence that twists & rises up the building to make wind-screens, & splits to make public-places. They’re designing now, near Eindhoven, a meditation park around an archeological site; in Luzerne, a portable retractable roof; in Santiago, a plaza divided into cluster-places for self-organization. http://www.acconci.com

DECEMBER 1 Montclair Art Museum 7:00 PM PANEL DISCUSSION ON ECOLOGY WITH ELEANOR HEARTNEY AS MODERATOR Eleanor Heartney, contributing editor to Art in America and Artpress, was named a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2008. She was also a recipient of the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism in 1992 and is a past and present visiting art critic with Montclair State University’s MFA Program. Eleanor Heartney's books include: Art and Today, 2008; After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art, 2007; Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art, 2004 and Defending Complexity: Art, Politics and the New World Order, 2006 and Postmodernism, 2001.

LOCATION: MONTCLAIR ART MUSEUM OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, ADMISSION TO THE LECTURE IS $10 FOR MAM MEMBERS, $15 FOR NON-MEMBERS AND FREE WITH MSU IDENTIFICATION.

The Montclair Art Museum is located at 3 South Mountain Avenue in Montclair, New Jersey. For further information contact MSU's MFA office, 973.655.4074 or the Montclair Art Museum at 973-746-5555